Global Usability: Russia

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273I. Douglas and Z. Liu (eds.), Global Usability, Human-Computer Interaction Series,

DOI 10.1007/978-0-85729-304-6_17, Springer-Verlag London Limited 2011

17.1 Country Profile

Even though Russia is the largest country in the world (16,377,742 km2 of land), its

142 million population is sparsely distributed across the vast land and concentrated

in the European part. 73% of the population lives in urban areas while 27% are in

rural areas. The countrys population is predominately ethnic Russian (79%), and

for 92% of it Russian is the first language. Russias GDP in 2008 was 1,418 billion

USD, and average salary in 2009 was 642 USD, although it is greatly varied

depending on the region. In Moscow, for example, the average salary was 1,090

USD. Educational level is high: 157 out of 1,000 adults have higher education

(Russian Federal State Statistics Service 2009a). Only 20 years ago the country

underwent rapid and profound transformations, in which its entire political and

economic systems were revamped. State-investment in the knowledge intensive sec-

tors of the economy dwindled, while the new and privatized industries of informa-

tion, communication and technology developed. This resulted in emergence of the

IT market, and consequently, the structure and organization of usability research.

Most of it is conducted today in the private sector.

17.2 IT Market

High-tech business development in Russia is hindered by the emphasis on natural

resources and their extraction. The latter is Russias basis for the GDP. According

to the estimates by the Ministry of Economic Development, IT market volume

was 17 billion USD in 2009, which implies that the entire IT market in Russia

A. Belyshkin (*)

Usethics, 11/2a, Armyanskiy pereulok, Moscow, Russia

e-mail: [email protected]

Chapter 17

Usability in Russia

Alexandr Belyshkin


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274 A. Belyshkin

(excluding communications) composed less than 1.5% of its GDP. The situation

in the service sector for the high-tech economy, usability for instance, was even

worse.

IT services (which include usability) compose only 28.6% of the total IT mar-

ket. The rest is shared between the Hardware market 51.4% and the Softwaremarket 20% (Ministry for Economic Development of Russian Federation

2009). In our own opinion, usability services compose no more than 1% of the

sector.

There is a certain paradox about usability testing in Russia. Russia has

recently become one of the leading IT outsourcing countries. Service export

volume, including the presence of development centers for foreign IT compa-

nies, rose to 1.7 billion USD. This is bigger than IT export for India. Russian

companies alternate between the 7th and the 8th position among 100 leading IT

service providers in the world. They are the leaders among suppliers in Centraland Eastern Europe (Makarov 2009). Despite these facts, specifically usability

testing is outsourced to Russia very rarely. This trend is difficult to understand

against the 5.5 billion USD profit that all Russian software companies shared

in 2008, and 2.65 billion USD gained from IT services and products export

(RUSSOFT 2009).

17.3 Web and Mobile Communication

The explosive growth of the Internet in Russia stimulated the field of usability.

In comparison to the year 2000, internet usage rates have grown by 1359,7%

(Miniwatts Marketing Group 2009). In summer 2009, 35% of the total popula-

tion (39.9 million people) used the internet at least once in 6 months (the Fund

Obshestvennoe mnenie 2009). Such growth attracted many investors to the

area of web development. As a result, competition level in most popular fields,

e.g. social networks, geo-information services, news portals etc. grew as well.

Services such as graphic design and usability became the main competitionfields. This created conditions for the development of a market for IT services,

namely, usability.

The fast growing mobile services market served as another push for advancing

usability. The development of mobile communications was even faster than that of

the Web. By the end of 2009, about 85% of people used at least one mobile operator

(AC&M 2010). Many unprepared and uneducated clients have joined the mobile

service usage, pushing operators to lower the entry step and simplify their service

interfaces. As a result, most mobile operators formed their own usability depart-

ments and established partnerships with international and Russian usability agen-cies. Thus, the expanding Internet, and computer and mobile communication

markets increased the demand for usability services in Russia.


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17.4 HCI/Usability History in Russia

17.4.1 Soviet Era

The changes did not arrive on virgin soil. The development in the field of engineer-

ing psychology and ergonomics in the late Soviet period was defined by two trends.

On the one hand, there were the heavy industry and military sectors which

demanded development of disciplines focused on human factors in technology. On

the other hand, production overall was not oriented toward the market. It was heav-

ily tilted toward the means of production and away from consumer goods. As a

result, the quality of Soviet consumer goods and services was extremely poor. The

design of goods reflected interests and technological limitations of manufacturers

and service providers, rather than needs and preferences of consumers. Arguably,by the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russian industries and business had

no experience in using design development and no design culture.1 This mentality

had a profound impact on the areas of knowledge related to interface

development.

The situation in the industry servicing sectors was somewhat better in compari-

son to the production of consumer goods and services. Several segments secured

governmental funding to support research in the fields of human factor and ergo-

nomics for weapons development, space research, aviation, shipping and railway,

atomic energy industry and continuous process industries. Those applicationsbecame the focus of few research groups in the Soviet Union. Departments of engi-

neering psychology and ergonomics were established in Moscow and Leningrad

(today St. Petersburg) State Universities in 1970 and 1966 respectively, and in sev-

eral other technical research institutions. In 1973 a Laboratory of engineering

psychology was created in the Institute of Psychology, at the Soviet Academy of

Sciences. The Ergocenter opened in 1978 in Tver and was one of the largest

research and development centers. It initially serviced the Industry of Defense. In

1990, after the reorganization, the Centre received a civilian status. Among the

most interesting in the Soviet period was the work of A.L. Yarbus who invented theworlds first eye-tracker and wrote on eye movement research. His book was pub-

lished in 1965 in the USSR and translated into English 2 years later (Yarbus 1967).

There were also a number of interesting practical achievements of the Soviet

period, which influenced HCI/Usability development in the post-Soviet years. A

complete review of the fields of engineering psychology and ergonomics during the

Soviet period is presented in English by G. Bedny and D. Meister (Bedny and

Meister 1997).

These unique world-class achievements took place in the context of the Soviet

scientific community lagging behind in development due to its isolation from the

international scientific society. In accordance with the planning by the Soviet

1 It is symptomatically that although there are two big industrial design schools in Russia until

recently there were fewer practicing industrial designers than practicing usability specialists.


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276 A. Belyshkin

government, development in the computer industry was centered on mainframes

and, partly, on midi- and mini-computers. Personal computers were not seriously

taken into account. Nevertheless, often illegally, PCs invaded Soviet technical and

scientific organizations. This resulted in a PC software development boom carried

on primarily by enthusiasts: professional programmers as well as various amateurs.At first this work was mostly done free of charge. However, the increased introduc-

tion of PCs for solving daily tasks of developing businesses created a commercial

demand for Russian, locally-developed software. As a result, a large number of

software development companies and software development departments in hard-

ware building companies were formed, their programmers starting to earn a reason-

ably high income.

A competitive software market emerged in the early 1990s represented by a high

variety of software applications of the same functionality, that is, dozens of

accounting programs designed by different developers. The phrase user friendli-ness adopted from Western European and North American contexts became one

of the more popular slogans. Behind it, however, there was no specific user quality

concept that could offer quantitative product estimation and comparison. Developers

often declared their product asuser friendly based only on graphical, but not

character-based user-interface realization. Whilst in Western Europe and North

America this problem was solved by the development of the concept of usability, in

post-Soviet Russia it remained marginal, if at all known among scientists as well as

commercial software developers.

17.4.2 East-West Human Computer Interaction International

Conferences (19911996): An Attempt to Import

HCI/Usability to Russia

This was the context in which in August 1991 the First International Workshop on

Human-Computer Interaction was held in Moscow. Seventy-five Soviet and 15

foreign specialists attended this meeting. This was the last year of the USSR (Bassand Gornostaev 1991). Following the success of this workshop, several annual East-

West conferences on Human-Computer Interaction (EWHCI) took place in Moscow

and St.-Petersburg between 1992 and 1996. Russia and other former republics of

the Soviet Union represented the East, while North America, Western Europe,

Australia and New Zealand represented the West. EWHCI conferences were

attended by many brilliant researchers and the overall quality of work presented

was very high. Selected papers from EWHCI 93, 94 and 95 were published by

Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (Bass et al.

1993; Blumenthal et al. 1994; Blumenthal et al. 1995). Very positive conferencereports for EWHCI 9194 were published in SIGCHI Bulletin (Cypher et al.

1991; Grudin et al. 1993; Instone et al. 1994; Price et al. 1995). No doubt, in

19921995, EWHCI was a world-level forum in the HCI field. Conferences were

sponsored by Apple Computer, Association for Computing Machinery Special


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Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI), Human Factors

Society and a number of local companies.

The interest of westerners in these events was not only in the desire to meet a

completely new research community and interchange ideas leading to broadened

perspectives and new creativity. They were also interested in the Activity Theorydeveloped in Russia as the HCI community started searching for new theoretical

frameworks to overcome difficulties in applying a cognitive approach to both

research and practical design. Activity Theory was considered capable of dealing

with the HCI problems.

Activity Theory, considered as the most important accomplishment of Russian

psychological science, has an extensive history dating back to the works of

Vygotsky and his followers, Leontev, Rubinstein and Galperin. However, except for

a couple of books published in the West and few publications in the western jour-

nals, the theory remained practically unknown outside the Soviet Union until themid-1980s. At that time it was picked up, reformulated and promoted by a number

of western researchers, mostly from Nordic countries. As a result, Activity Theory

today is associated not only with Russian psychological tradition, but has become

rather a theoretical ground for the larger international community and involved

researchers from Europe, North America and Australia.

By the mid-1990s, the economic situation in Russia worsened. Destructive

economic reforms, drastic reduction in manufacturing, large-scale deindustrializa-

tion, and a severe crisis in higher education and science development forced many

Russian researches and practitioners to abandon their HCI-related careers for newsales- and business-related jobs that offered higher salaries. The brain drain among

the Russian HCI community was considerable. For example, the leading theorists of

the Applied Activity Theory approach to HCI, V. Kaptelinin and I. Verenikina, are

now working in Sweden and Australia, respectively.

As a result, participation of non-Western researchers and the quality of presenta-

tions at the EWHCI were decreasing every year. The conference had transformed

into meetings for Westerners on Russian territory. The year 1996 was the last

when EWHCI met. One of the reasons for the withdrawal of western specialists

from these meetings was the fact that not many Russian delegates were prepared toaccept the HCI/Usability concepts as the only paradigm for their future work. Quite

often, participating Russian specialists did not have a direct relationship to HCI

their software was just interactive, albeit advanced. It was evident from their annual

presentations that their main research interests were in the spheres peripheral to the

HCI/Usability mainstream, such as artificial intelligence, hypertext, computer-

assisted learning, information visualization, digital libraries, multimedia etc.

The first attempt to import an accomplished western HCI/Usability paradigm to

Russia was unsuccessful, as it had been rejected conceptually by the Russian aca-

demic community, which at the time went into a decline. The emerging commercialsoftware industry was not ready to accept usability as a key market differentiation

parameter for their products.

Still the current situation with usability in Russia is rather positive, and the

EWHCI era played its important role in forming this situation. Today, the veterans


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278 A. Belyshkin

of the movement and young enthusiastic newcomers work successfully in this field.

The results of their work and its impact on the field of usability will be discussed

in the following sections.

17.4.3 Modern Era of Usability in Russia

The current situation in Russia, including organizational aspects, the growth of the

commercial sector, as well as education, differs greatly from the Soviet period, and

bears signs of great improvement.

17.4.3.1 Commercial Companies

At present there are at least seven companies specializing in usability services:

Usethics (founded in 2001), UIdesign Group (2003), UsabilityLab (2006),

HumanoIT Group (2007), HCI.ru (2008), UI Modeling Company (2008) and

interUX Usability Engineering Studio (2009). Moreover many web-agencies offer

expert UI evaluation or testing. Altogether there are about 30 freelance specialists

consulting in the field.

Overall in Russia the UI is viewed through the lens of design. Only four com-

panies from the above list offer usability testing and have usability labs (Usethics,UIDesign Group, UsabilityLab and interUX). Most companies dont even mention

usability testing on their web sites, focusing purely on UI design. Nevertheless,

research culture and technology in companies specializing in usability testing and

big interface departments meet the standards of world-wide practice.

17.4.3.2 Interface Departments

The first usability department was created in 1997 in the company RTS StockExchange. Since then, more businesses added usability testing to their operation.

At present, several companies have testing and UI design departments with over

10 employees. These companies are Beeline (Vimpelkom, department founded in

2006), 1C, Yandex, ABBY, Parallels, Acronis (2007), Kaspersky Lab (2008).

Besides these companies, by the end of 2009 at least 20 others established smaller

departments or hired individual full-time specialists.

1C is a good example of the growing importance of UI departments in contem-

porary software development in Russia. The company has a substantial UI depart-

ment consisting of 15 specialists, who only last year (2009) performed over 100tests of different 1C products. The impact of this companys usability department

is considerable, since many other firms adopt the 1Cs technological platform.

These partner-firms, for instance, are influenced to invest in their own departments

of UI and usability testing.


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17.4.3.3 Offshore Usability

Usability testing and expert evaluation are the main projects conducted for interna-

tional clients in Russia. There is a demand for exhaustive usability testing, in the

course of which Russian specialists adapt stimuli material and report the problemsfound. Testing-support services, by which Russian companies mainly provide the

logistics (participants recruitment, hotel booking, translation etc.) are also common.

Based on their experience, local specialists aim at adapting the tests to local cultural

and social specificities in order to avoid possible problems related to cultural differ-

ences. Problems of such kind include seemingly grammatically correct, but in fact

wrong questionnaire translations, interface localization errors, etc., which tend to dis-

tort the collected data and result in inaccurate test findings. Fluency in Russian is often

not enough. There is also a need for the adequate understanding of Russian reality.

Nowadays remote test monitoring, during which the customer observes the testswith simultaneous translation via the Web, is becoming popular. This scheme

allows customers to save on traveling without losing on the detailed, real time control

of the testing process. As a rule, a local moderator or assistant can identify problems

arising during the test more precisely and finely than a non Russian-speaker or

someone unfamiliar with local reality. Even if the project budget doesnt include a

report preparation, it still pays to organize a short briefing after each testing day in

order to discuss problems found by local specialists. A more detailed review of offshore

usability in Russia is presented in the paper by I. Burmistrov (Burmistrov 2006).

17.4.3.4 Usability Organizations and Conferences

The Russian usability community has a rather peculiar history. The Russian local

branch of the ACM SIGCHI (a shortened MosCHI) was launched in 1992, and Juri

Gornostaev became its first Chair. Unfortunately, by the late 1990s, under the chair-

manship of MosCHIs next Chair, Vladislav Valkovsky, the organized usability

movement in Russia turned to complete dormancy suffering the same fate as

EWHCI conferences.The rebirth of the usability community took place in 1999, when Yaroslav

Perevalov and Ivan Burmistrov of RTS Stock Exchange created a web site called

Usability in Russia (www.usability.ru) with an internet discussion board as a part

of this site. Very quickly the Usability Forum broke the wall of silence that

reigned in Russian HCI since the last EWHCI conference. The forum turned out to

be a very popular and demanded resource. After a period of virtual communication,

Russian usability specialists met each other at a real workshop in 2001. The workshop

became regular, and between 2001 and 2004 there were 14 meetings of this type.

Usually between 25 and 40 people from the European part of Russia participated inthese workshops with a constant core of about 15 participants.

Inevitably, at some point leaders of the movement started thinking about the

formal standing of their community. After visiting CHI04 in Vienna and discussing

the possibilities with ACM SIGCHI officials, Ivan Burmistrov and Alexey Kopylov


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280 A. Belyshkin

(cofounder of the UIDesign Group) presented at one such meeting a report of the

conference with a special emphasis on the Russian communitys prospects as a

branch of SIGCHI. A meeting held in June 2004 became the constituent assembly

of the Russian Special Interest Group. A new short name for the Russian SIG,

RusCHI, was also introduced in order to accentuate that this was a new community,and not a sequel of the former unsuccessful MosCHI.

RusCHI was chartered as an official local chapter of ACM SIGCHI on September

30, 2004. Ivan Burmistrov was elected as the first Chair of RusCHI. Currently, this

is the largest usability community in Russia. Amongst its main activities are orga-

nization of regular workshops (from two to seven meetings per year) and large-

scale events such as World Usability Day conferences, which began in 2006 and

attract about 200 participants each year. The website of RusCHI is www.sigchi.ru.

There is also a local UPA branch (UPA:Russia), founded by UsabilityLab and

closely affiliated to this company. Besides that, a youth community named ErgoProwas set up in 2008. This community consolidates young specialists and students

who decide to connect their future career with usability.

There also is the Inter-Regional Ergonomics Association, which emerged in

1995 as a result of the Soviet Ergonomics Association reorganization. It is a not

totally field specific Association, but nevertheless it is functioning. The main goal

of IREA is to facilitate communication and collaboration between all specialists on

ergonomics working in different regions of Russia. Specialists from the same

region constitute a Regional Branch of IREA. IREA is a Federated Society of the

International Ergonomics Association (IEA) and Federation of EuropeanErgonomics Societies (FEES). The IREA activity is coordinated and agrees with

the policy and Strategic Plan of these organizations.

Publications on the subject of usability and ergonomics are small in volume but

high in quality. In addition to translations of Western literature to Russian, there

have also been some original Russian-language publications such as the book by

Vlad V. Golovach UI Design: skills to wash an elephant. Available as a free

download online, it was read by over 15,000 people in 1 year.

17.4.3.5 Scientific Organizations

The current situation in research and education is the opposite to that in the com-

mercial sector. The collapse of the USSR led to fast degradation in the sphere of

research and education. Engineering psychology and ergonomics suffered from two

main causes. The first was the absence of a minimally necessary governmental

financial support, and the second was that high-technology industries practically

ceased to exist. As a result, there were no venues to work at and to apply the knowl-

edge to. Ergocenter is an example of this disorganization. Ergocenter was oneof the biggest Russian organizations providing scientific support to weapons manufac-

turing. Soon after the collapse of the USSR it lost most of its personnel. The few of

the remaining employees today are occupied writing scientifically outdated aca-

demic textbooks.


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However, there are some positive points in the overall pessimistic picture.

For example, there are courses in HCI and usability taught at a number of universi-

ties, and these include Human-Computer Interaction at Moscow, St.-Petersburg,

Novosibirsk and Novgorod State Universities, and Mari State Technical University;

Software and Hardware Ergonomics at Moscow Institute of Radio-Engineering,Electronics and Automation (MIREA). The first and still the only Russian textbook

on HCI was published in 2005 under the guidance of Ergocenter (Magazannik

and Lvov 2005). Its second reprint appeared 2 years ago.

A positive example of a research group that has fully integrated and productively

works within the HCI paradigm is the Laboratory of Work Psychology (LWP) at

the Moscow State University (the head of the laboratory is Prof. Anna Leonova).

Since 1993, the laboratory pioneers research on interruptions in human-computer

interaction, a theme which has become widely-accepted in international research

and development activities since the 2000s. The laboratorys great emphasis is oncombining an ecologically valid experimental setting with a rigorous experimental

design. LWP studies investigate the influence of factors such as the interrupted

operation complexity and the complexity of interrupting tasks on various indices of

interruption handling effectiveness like switching and resumption time and number

of errors. The analysis of conventional performance indices is backed up by the

analysis of subjects behavior as well as eye movement registration and recordings

of physiological reactions. Interruptions are the main but not the only theme in

the laboratorys research program. The laboratory had been involved in many joint

collaborative research projects with a number of universities in Germany, TheNetherlands, and Belgium. Key results of the LWP works are available in publications

(see, for example, Zijlstra et al. 1999; De Keyser and Leonova 2001; Burmistrov

and Leonova 2003; Leonova et al. 2009). The laboratory maintains state-of-the-art

research facilities including TechSmith Morae, Noldus Observer and advanced eye-

tracking equipment. An important feature of LWP is its close relationship with the

software industry. Many LWP staff members have commercial assignments in addi-

tion to the research tasks within the university. No doubt, they are the best candi-

dates for scientific co-operation and joint research in Russia in HCI and related

fields.

17.5 Usability Testing in Russia: Distinctive Features

Even though Russia geographically is the largest country in the world, linguistically

its population is rather homogenous. Russian language is native for 92% of the

countrys residents. In spite of this homogeneity, there are differences in income

levels, consumer preferences and life attitudes. Those differences are the most

significant among the following groups of cities:

Moscow

Cities of capital type consumption (Saint. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg,

Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Kazan, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Rostov-on-Don, Ufa)


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282 A. Belyshkin

Other large cities

Small provincial towns and villages.

This geographic particularity determines the first distinctive feature of usability

testing in Russia: its resource-intensity. Due to the fact that the geographic distancesbetween the second group of cities and Moscow are rather vast and transport

networks are far from developed, is it is quite difficult to conduct large usability

studies in Russia.

The second feature is a difficulty securing participation. An average fee for

participating in a usability test in Moscow and the second type cities is about 1,000

rubles (about 35 USD). In cases of need in respondents with rare skills or high-

income level, the incentive can rise up to 150200 USD. The time which partici-

pants need to get to the lab can be a serious demotivating factor. Even within

Moscow it might take potential participants up to1.5 h to get to the lab. On average

1020% of respondents dont attend at all or appear more than an hour late to a

study. It is recommended to use a double recruiting scheme to exclude the possibil-

ity of a participants non-attendance. In this case two participants are being

recruited for the same time and if they both attend, the more suitable candidate is

chosen. The rejected one receives half of the agreed fee.

Another common problem is that in Russia tests commonly encounter exceeding

loyalty of the participant to the tested product. Participants, especially those who

are not professional users, often blame themselves for difficulties occurring when

they try a product. Participants are often ready to spend more time doing the test

rather than report a difficulty in use. As a result, they do not voice their difficulties

and they do not complain about the product itself.

Video and audio recording tend not to be problems, if participants are notified

about them in advance.

When coming to a study, participants should be asked to bring an ID (normally

a civil passport) for signing the NDA considering test contents. If recruiting is done

through the web, participants should be notified about the recruitment procedure.

They should know that it is necessary to give answers to several questions before

being invited for the test. Those who give answers corresponding to screener

requirements will be invited. They are not paid to answer those questions. Notmany agencies specialize in participants recruitment for tests and focus groups. In

most cases, the partner agency fulfils this function.

The chance of getting participants with fluent English is rather small. If

English fluency is required, it should be included in the screener. It will be nec-

essary to make a quick test in English usage before the testing. Participants

should be informed upfront that they wont be paid if the test is failed. These

requirements stimulate participants to evaluate their skills and suitability for a

particular test more adequately. Average price for professional simultaneous

translation from Russian into one of the European languages varies between 100and 200 USD per hour.

Due to a number of state holidays and school vacations, January and May are

not the best months for conducting research in Russia.


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It is quite easy and cheap to get Internet access from a laptop or a mobile phone

in Moscow and other big cities. On the other hand, quality and prices for hotel

accommodations often leave much to be desired.

There is one important factor that needs to be taken into account when making

payments to Russian companies: foreign currency accounts in Russian banksconsist of 20 digits, whereas European banks have 16 digits. The IBAN system is

not used in Russia. This factor makes transfers to Russia rather difficult. For example

one of our clients had to send the money three times before our bank could credit

it to our account.

17.6 Usability in Russia: The Future

Although slowed down in the past by economical and political factors, commer-

cially driven usability activities are more or less flourishing. Since this paper left its

draft stage, at least two new interface design companies appeared in the market, and

a new professional community (Polezny Club / Useful club) emerged. It can be

safely projected that in the next few years usability, and especially UI design activities,

in Russia will double. At the same time, there is still a noticeable lack of govern-

mental funding and scientific research activities. There is little to no hope of any

major improvement in these areas in the future.

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